Galled by clerical antifeminism (woman is weak and hence evil), the power-obsessed Alison turns for her tale to courtly romance (woman is weak and hence good). Thus, ultimately she subverts the conventions of estates, gender, and genre, proving…
The disjuncture between the confessional (yet not moral) part 1 and the fabliau-like part 2 of CYT derives in part from the essential split between the futile effort toward production in part 1 and the nonproductive but successful cheating of part 2.…
Reads the kiss between the Pardoner and the Host at the end of PardT as a challenge to "the repressive binaries of a hermeneutical model based on heterosexual reproduction." The Pardoner inverts dominant ideology, and the kiss brings to readers'…
CT "shows a surprising array" of ways in which Chaucer "ignores, skirts, transcends, or even anticipates structural closure," engaging his readers in the "dialogic processes of discourse itself." Surveys techniques of openendedness in CT, arguing…
Argues that English became the official language of England in the fifteenth century as the result of "deliberate, official policy." Dissemination of Chaucer's works and those of his followers suggests that the poet was chosen as the "cynosure" of a…
Forum letter in which Braxton, disagreeing with Pamela Michaela Paasche, claims that closure is evident in Chaucer's works when his male point of view is recognized, and presents MerT as a "case in point."
Since Chaucer does not describe the Pardoner's kiss, it could be either mouth-to-mouth or cheek-to-cheek; in either case, a public kiss signifies a sort of equality. A reply to Ann Barbeau Gardiner PMLA 108 (1993): 333-34.
Questions John H. Fisher's "Language Policy for Lancastrain England" (PMLA 107) on method of establishing Chaucerian texts. See Fisher's "Forum Reply."
The treatment of Chaucer (often in translation) in cultural studies programs tends to divest his verse of its poetic qualities as, for example, in the tournament in "The Knight and His Tale."
Contrasts the "star system" of contemporary critics (e.g., Derrida) with the previous paradigm of dominant but nonstellar scholars in Chaucer studies. George Lyman Kittredge, John M. Manly, and John Livingston Lowes serve as examples.
Discusses the idea of the anthology as a fundamental characteristic of medieval literature, using CT as an example because individual tales were often copied into other anthologies.
Reads PrT and its concern with usury in light of medieval architectural construction and its dependence upon financing through lending, arguing that although the Tale demonizes Jewish lenders and exalts Christians through associations with,…
Refers to Chaucer throughout, first by supposing what his early education was like, then by addressing the late-medieval relation between Latin and English as evident in HF, NPT, and ManT. Argues that "the work of Chaucer, Langland, and Gower…
Discusses "the narrator's rhetoric of pity," alluding to Augustine, Aristotle, Cicero, and others, while arguing that both pity and poetry involve "a kind of authentic inauthenticity" that is unstable, paradoxical, and contingent in LGW.
Reads the relations between the planetary event and perspectives on it in Mars as analogous to those between form and interpretation in new formalist literary analysis. In Mars the celestial motion of the geocentric universe is subject to the…
Treats prosimetrum as "a unique medieval genre that mixes not only prose and verse but also narrative and lyric," and studies its implications for theorizations of the lyric mode, particularly the opposition between the Romantic notion of lyrics as…
Argues MLT does not ultimately offer (English) land and (Christian) civilization as images of stability or "legal fixity" but the sea and Constance's paleness as images of an "exemplary fluidity," emphasizing that the tale is about "global ethics"…
